"Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller got into an argument and George Wallace won."

Jonathan Rauch looks at the state of the GOP. He's not trying to call contemporary Republicans racist by connecting them to Wallace:

[L]ike Wallace and his supporters 40 years ago, today's conservative
populists are long on anger and short on coherence. For Wallace,
small-government rhetoric was a trope, not a workable agenda. The same
is true of his Republican heirs today, who insist that spending cuts
alone, without tax increases, will restore fiscal balance but who have
not proposed anywhere near enough spending cuts, primarily because they
can't.

The meat of his article:

I am saying three things.

First, with the important exception of race, not one of Wallace's
central themes, from his bristling nationalism and his court-bashing to
his anti-intellectualism and his aggressive provincialism, would seem
out of place at any major Republican gathering today.

Second, and again leaving race aside, any Republican politician who
publicly renounced the Wallace playbook would be finished as a national
leader.

Third, by becoming George Wallace's party, the GOP is abandoning
rather than embracing conservatism, and it is thereby mortgaging both
its integrity and its political future. Wallaceism was not sufficiently
mainstream or coherent to sustain a national party in 1968, and the
same is true today.

Conservatism is wary of extremism and rage and anti-intellectualism,
of demagoguery and incoherent revolutionary rhetoric. Wallace was a
right-wing populist, not a conservative. The rise of his brand of
pseudo-conservatism in Republican circles should alarm anyone who cares
about the genuine article.

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